Estelle Duchenne
Appearance With her willowy frame and wavy dark hair, Estelle cuts a rather elegant figure. She is pale, and has a tendency to sunburn rather than tan. She has thick dark eyelashes framing black sclera and intense teal eyes. Her face is heart-shaped and her features are angled, giving her the appearance of nobility. Estelle usually wears her hair tied up into a side bun and ponytail with a teal bow with orange piping, a cartoonish silver spider pin with orange jewels, and a cream spiderweb-patterned veil. While she has myriad wigs and color contacts at her disposal, she prefers sticking with her natural hair and eye color. For her main outfit, Estelle wears a backless dress with a cream ruffled top and a brown skirt with vertical stripes. On top, she wears a teal and orange corset that tapers off in the back. She wears velveteen opera-cut brown gloves with teal fabric underneath, high-heeled black knee-high boots, and teal leggings with an orange spiderweb pattern embroidered on the side, and brown straps attached to a garterbelt. Personality Estelle, above all, loves beautiful things. She loves being in beautiful places, surrounding herself with beautiful objects and people, endearing herself to them by being extremely affectionate or giving them gifts. Aesthetically speaking, Estelle tends to find women more attractive than men, but she will dote on anybody she finds remotely pleasing. At a first glance, Estelle is very vain and vapid. While not entirely untrue, she is quite shrewd and clever. However, she will gladly play up this prevailing impression of her, often pretending that she is denser than she actually is. At her very core, Estelle is quite ruthless, and will cut away anything away from her that she deems is no longer worth keeping. For the most part, she will settle for playing the fool, because she finds that it is the easiest mask to wear. She is often at the center of a room, causing ruckus and being comic relief. She is rather good at plotting schemes and is good at escaping punishment for her misdeeds. When it matters, Estelle prefers to be in the background supporting others instead of the one in the spotlight, because she feels like being at the core of a group's inner workings is the most fun. Despite her sinister tendencies, she is a crybaby when overwhelmed and her strength is brittle at best. Without any masks on, the true Estelle is rather reserved, if not a little shy, and can smile earnestly. However, she's grown to feel empty on the inside, and with little purpose to live for, so she hides the feeling from herself by pretending to be much more sociable than she is. Estelle is quite creative and has an affinity for fashion and design, often making full outfits and giving them to others on a whim. She acts spoiled and has a tendency to throw money at her problems to make them go away, but she also has some worldliness to her, and has a killer business sense. Backstory Estelle was born in an orphanage in America. At this time, she was called Emily. Nobody wanted to associate with or adopt a creepy-looking spider girl, and she was a pariah at the orphanage, save for her best friend, a lion māji called Leo. The two were inseparable, and Leo, rather charismatic and popular, refused to be adopted unless Emily was adopted alongside him. When Emily was eight, somebody interested in adopting her appeared. However, Leo, for a reason Emily didn't understand, claimed that they had to escape this person and leave the orphanage. With unwavering faith in her surrogate brother, she followed him and the two ran away. For about two years, the pair lived on the streets, barely scraping by at times but content in their orphans' life. One day, a wealthy-looking man found them in their ramshackle home. He claimed to be Emily's father, by one of his mistresses, and wanted to adopt her into the Duchenne family. To the duo's bewilderment, Leo's power showed that the man was telling the truth. Insisting that Leo be adopted alongside her, to which her father acquiesced, the two moved into the Duchenne manor in Nice, France. They discovered that the family was one consisting of various māji, the children of the current head of the family by various mistresses, or orphans adopted into the family on a whim. Emily quickly found herself the favorite of her father. Her siblings, while tense at the presence of a new child, treated her genially. She was in disbelief over her rapid change in station, but Emily was jubilant at the opportunity. However, Leo seemed to grow increasingly on edge as the months passed. Suddenly, he disappeared without a trace. Soon after, a large amount of money was stolen from the Duchenne family, and was found on Emily's person. Her life crumbling around her, she could ony stand by as she was nearly incarcerated and disowned from the only family she had left. However, she was saved. The beloved heir of the clan, Marie, and the person whose money was stolen, offered to take Emily in as a mentor and rehabilitate her from her uncouth upbringing. The idea was accepted, and Marie became Emily's guardian. This was not the savior she had been hoping for. Marie, whose mature, kind exterior endeared everybody to her, was actually quite ruthless and cruel. Every other child in the Duchenne family had been subjugated by her. Ever since her arrival, she had been actively sabotaging Emily, who was a disruptor of the status quo. However, her attempts had always been thwarted by Leo, who eventually confronted her on the issue. As she couldn't have someone who had figured her out walking around, Marie dealt with Leo, and with him gone, duping the trusting Emily was child's play. With sadistic pleasure, Marie relayed this truth to Emily. Emily was reduced to something like a servant and a punching bag for her older sister. She did Marie's bidding, being mentally and physically abused all the while. During this time, she was given the name "Estelle" in order to sound more French. Her closest companion dead by the individual holding power her, Estelle contemplated suicide. Then, she contemplated the much more attractive idea of revenge, and decided to pursue it. Her first tries were clumsy murder attempts that ended in her accomplices being ruined and her being severely beaten. Eventually, Estelle came to the conclusion that she would never be able to defeat Marie with a head-on attack. She became very good at playing the role of a broken victim to her sister and a reformed street urchin to the public. Eventually, she also learned how to become a prospective ally, as she befriended various people behind her sister's back. She began designing clothing to complement her sister's modeling career, and gained a huge amount of success under the name "Reclusa." Estelle endured her sister for five years before her plans culminated in a calculated, flawlessly-executed evening that resulted in the murder of Marie Duchenne. As she stood over her body, Estelle only felt emptiness. In searching revenge, she'd become something unrecognizable. In order to fill the emptiness in her belly threatening to eat her up, Estelle took a bit of her sister, found that she liked the taste, and consumed her completely. After successfully covering up Marie's death as a suicide, everything passed almost too smoothly. Nobody suspected that Estelle, who must surely love her sister more than anyone else in the world, murdered her. Since she had been helping Marie with her duties in the family business, and her "rehabilitation" had granted her a glowing reputation, there was little protest with granting her the title of heir. In the months following the event, Estelle, feeling like her world had been drained of color, traveled from place to place aimlessly in an attempt to find something that would move her again. Her adventures were often dangerous and borderline-suicidal. People looked at her with pity, thinking that she was grieving Marie's death. One day, during a foray in some abandoned hospital in Japan, she came across a rather pretty girl with painfully familiar red eyes, with hair color and a temperament eerily similar to her deceased brother. However small, she'd found a purpose again – to inflict her presence on this chagrined girl. With newfound motivation, she was able to return to the family business, reestablish relationships with her contacts, and start drawing again. Having spent many productive months outside of Japan, she returned, eager to spend more time with the girl. In her pursuit of this goal, she found a school that would have no problem accepting a ghost, Osaka Gakuen, and made arrangements for both herself and the girl. Abilities Estelle is an exceptionally talented designer with an eye for detail and color. She can accurately guess a person's measurements simply by looking at them, and can quickly decide on clothing that she thinks would flatter them the most, though her tastes tend to skew towards the frilly and extravagant. She is practiced with drawing and naturally, can sew very well. Estelle is not physically powerful, given her impoverished upbringing. However, she is a decent shot with a gun and is learning her way around using various polearms and lances. L'araignée Perhaps the magical ability Estelle uses the most often, L'araignée allows Estelle to produce large amounts of cloth and thread of various colors and properties, mimicking those of real cloth. However, cloth produced by this ability tends to be more durable than the cloth it is imitating, since it is laced with protein. Estelle is able to produce cloth at her own whim with great precision, but overdoing it leaves her with a headache and malnourished, as L'araignée partially draws nutrients from her own body to work.When invoking this ability, Estelle makes a move as if she is pulling scarves out of her sleeve, and the cloth appears. Poisons Estelle is able to produce poisons of varying strength from her mouth, that she can inject with fangs that extend from her regular teeth. When she doesn't have anything in mind, the poison she creates causes necrosis and loxoscelism, However, if she expends some energy, she can produce substances that are mere paralytics, to deadly toxins that can kill in seconds. She has an easier time imitating poison or venom that she has been affected by herself, which she does recreationally in small doses to strengthen this ability. White Rabbit Estelle's creation, "White Rabbit," is something that she spent years refining. In its final form, it is incredibly taxing for her to use, taking off about ten years from her lifespan. "White Rabbit" tears off a small portion of Estelle's soul to use, and poisons the affected organism's vascular system, causing death in about 18 hours. If the affected were to go to a hospital and manually filter out their blood, the poison would be completely nullified. However, if the afflicted uses magic or has magic used on them, the poison consumes the magic and become stronger, the potency of the poison amplifying with the amount of magic used. White Rabbit can also spread between people, if another person tries to use magic on the original afflicted person. Notes * "Estelle" means "star." * Her alias "Reclusa," refers to the brown recluse spider, which she is based on. * Her current profile artwork was drawn by faithom. SILSS1.png|by silss Innastar 02.png|by innastar Okamagic.png|by okamagic Category:Female Category:Māji Category:Character Category:Student Category:Accepted Character